As previously mentioned, last Friday I put together a "new" gaming PC. I threw some quotes on there because not everything about the computer is new. I was able to keep a couple components from the last time I upgraded (about 2 years ago). The biggest being the motherboard. I've been buying parts since black Friday to help keep this build in my budget. I saved the most expensive stuff for last since I wasn't sure I was really going to be able to finish. We lucked out this year and my wife got the big bonus and I was able to wrap everything up earlier that I had anticipated. Enough of my babbling, here's the stats as unimpressive as they are:
Motherbord: ASRock FM2A75M Pro4+
As I mentioned before I bought this board a couple years ago along with an AMD A6 processor for pretty cheap and it's been a solid board for me. It was one of the first boards to include USB3.0 which is nice. I've never had any BIOS or driver issues with this one. I'm glad I'm able to keep it around for a while.
Processor: AMD A10-5800K Trinity Quad-Core 3.8 GHz
For what they are these AMD processors that include the GPU (that's a graphics processor for the uninitiated) are pretty decent. The old A6 I had allowed me to at least play older games like Portal and Lego Lord of the Rings. I upgraded to the A10 specifically because AMD isn't making these anymore and I was able to grab one for cheap. It doesn't blow the A6 out of the water or anything but it's an upgrade. Of course at this point it's easily the weakest part of my build. I'm going to knock on wood that I'm able to squeeze a couple more years out of it.
Ram & Hard Drive: My computer had 8 gigs of RAM now it has 16.
I bought the cheapest I could find, which still came with a ridiculous looking heat sink and says "XTREME" all over it. My build isn't fancy enough for me to be quibbling over the speed of my RAM. I also upgraded to a solid state HD a couple months ago, specifically a Samsung 850 EVO. It's only 250 Gigs but man is it fast. My PC boots up in about 6 seconds now. I have another 1 TB drive I keep movies and music on.
Graphics Card: Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 380 GDDR5 4GB
This is where I spent as much as I could. I went by a roundup on Tom's Hardware Guide. They had the AMD Radeon R9 380 as one of their best value video cards and Tom's has never steered me wrong before. Even though this is supposedly a compact card that doesn't use a lot of power it still required me to upgrade the power supply in my rig. The new power supply ended up requiring a new case. Not only was it bigger with like a thousand cords that I couldn't fit in my old case but the only way it mounted in my old case had the fan blowing straight at my video card. It made zero sense. The case I bought was a Silverstone Tek Aluminum Micro-ATX case. It was the least obnoxious case they had a Frys. I lucked out that it had a pretty good cable management system.
So the $64,000 question, how does it game? Very well so far. I haven't had a ton of time to try it out with different games, mostly because I'm super into Fallout 3 right now. Fallout 3 looks fantastic, it looked good before but now all the settings are maxed out it looks a lot better. It's an older game so it's not ground breaking or anything but it looks better than anything I have on the Xbox 360. Portal is about the same, you can tell it's dated but it really looks good. The Lego games my son loves great too. Those games have never been system hogs or anything but you can really crank up the resolution and the colors look great. They used to drop some frames when too many characters were on the screen at once but that looks all cleared up.
The most modern game I was able to try was Tomb Raider (the soft reboot from 2013). I ran the benchmark on it with two different settings. The first on medium graphics and the second on high (not max). On medium the game ran at an average of 59fps and on high it ran at an average of 54fps. The trade off is definitely worth the small dip in fps. I'm definitely satisfied with the results. I shouldn't have a problem playing any modern PC game for at leas the next couple years. My next upgrade will probably be a new motherboard and processor but I have a feeling that this video card will do what I need it to for 2-3 more years.
I'll probably pick up Star Wars Battlefront in the next couple months. I don't want to wait too long, I remember I did that with Battlefield 2 and the learning curve was steep as hell when everyone left playing the game had were hardened vets. Fallout 4 is definitely on my list too, but I have to beat 3 AND New Vegas first.
I've included some random pictures of the processes, starting with a pic of the old case and the rats nest of wires I couldn't wrangle.
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